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With 1.35 billion active monthly users, Facebook continues to be the world’s largest social network by some margin, but when it comes to picking up new users, it appears to have reached a saturation point. Research out today from the Global Web Index notes that Tumblr’s active user base in the last six months grew by 120%, while Facebook’s grew by only 2%.

And in overall member growth, Pinterest took the lead with 57% growth while Facebook’s member base grew by 6%.

Instagram, LinkedIn,Twitter, YouTube and even Google+ all grew faster than Facebook.

In mobile apps specifically, while Facebook is the largest app today, Snapchat — with an emphasis on teen and 20-something users — is the fastest growing of them all, up 56% this year. It is however followed closely by Facebook Messenger and Instagram — a sign of not just how Facebook’s mobile apps continue to represent the company’s growth drivers, but…

The transitions of three young Canadian men are each severe and mystifying: a confident, ambitious student-council president in Hamilton who snuck away to fight with ISIS in Syria; a poker-playing party guy in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu who steered his car into two soldiers; and, the most recent to force headlines, a troubled drug addict and petty criminal who shot dead a soldier on ceremonial duty in Ottawa before storming Canada’s Parliament.

Each came from a different place, geographically but also socially, but all ended up in a similar space, as bit players in a driving global narrative of Westerners swapping normality — traversing the spectrum from laudable to disgraceful — for a life and quick death consumed by extremist ideology and violent aggression.

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And in each case, what has thusly emerged as a common thread is not a clandestine sect of militant recruiters in Canada mentoring selected targets but rather a…

We’ve all been there. Whether it’s a picture of your friend’s new baby or your Aunt’s incessant updates about the weather in smalltown America, there are certain people in your social-media feeds that you’d like to just tune out for a bit (even just temporarily).

Social networks seem to be listening and have been rolling out features to help users regain a little bit of control of their social feeds without ruffling the feathers of any friends. The problem is each network has its own definition of tuning out someone, not to mention its own terminology.

To help you out, I combed some of the most popular social networks and muted/blocked/ignored/unfollowed everyone and everything I could. For a quick look, see our chart below. But we also have step-by-step pictures and an easy-to-follow guide for each network to make it easy to mute away.

[tc_dropcap]I joined Google the day after my Stanford graduation in June of 2011, and two days later got to take a peek at the product I would be working on for the next three months. There had been rumors in the press for a while that Google was building some sort of secret social network, but these stories were mostly unsubstantiated rumors.[/tc_dropcap]

Now, for the first time, I got to look upon the future of the world’s most recognizable Internet company and, perhaps, the future of social as well.

The product, internally known as Emerald Sea, was just two weeks from launch, and a digital counter near my desk was ticking down the days to June 28, 2011. I had just gotten my Google-issued laptop, so I opened up my web browser, and navigated to the internal version of the product, and …. stared. Just stared. It’s hard to…